After a Brush With Death, Focusing on the Next Step

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Azzura’e Wilson, 17, with her father, John Wilson, almost died in a car crash in 2012. She left a rehabilitation center last May and has continued physical therapy, hoping to walk again.CreditKirsten Luce for The New York Times

The summer before her junior year of high school, Azzura’e Wilson joined her father for a road trip to Baltimore to pick up her grandmother. Like many of her peers, Azzura’e, 17, decided to share the candid moment with her friends and family on Instagram.

“On the road with my dad to Maryland,” she wrote, under a collage of images showing her relaxing in the passenger seat of her father’s 2002 Nissan Altima. In one image, her big hazel eyes gaze directly into the camera. In another, a slanted view of the front window shows the traffic outside as the two left the South Bronx. “Have a safe trip,” her first commenter wrote. “Thank you,” she responded.

On the return trip, a tractor-trailer slammed into the back of the car on the New Jersey Turnpike. Azzura’e’s father, John Wilson, heard his daughter scream as her body was ejected through a back-seat window. As he struggled to reach for her, he realized that he and the other passenger, his mother, were pinned beneath the car’s roof. The truck dragged Azzura’e (pronounced ah-ZOO-ray) and the car for half a mile.

As Azzura’e lay unconscious in the middle of the highway, her body was struck again, by a passing car that was unable to avoid her.

Azzura’e was rushed to Hackensack University Medical Center, where she remained in a coma while receiving 24-hour intensive care. Her father suffered 14 fractured ribs, and her grandmother had a broken neck. News accounts of the accident said that rescue workers were astonished that Azzura’e was still alive.

Azzura’e vividly remembered the hours before the accident, almost a month later, when she awakened from her coma, but she has difficulty recalling the accident itself. She had a broken neck, spine and leg. Skin graft surgery had replaced the skin on her knee and toe. A tracheotomy tube was inserted in her neck to help her breathe, while a gastrostomy tube delivered nutrition to her stomach.

But it was not the multiple operations that shocked Azzura’e. It was how much of the school year had passed.

Before the accident, Azzura’e had been one of the top students at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the South Bronx. She was elected vice president of the school’s student government as a sophomore, a role typically filled by upperclassmen. She also played on the school’s basketball team and had been practicing to audition for the varsity squad.

Two weeks after she woke up from the coma, Azzura’e was moved to Blythedale Children’s Hospital, in Valhalla, N.Y., where she spent the next seven months in intensive physical therapy.

Her father, a retired Iraq war veteran who supports his family on a mix of benefits and his retirement fund, visited Azzura’e at Blythedale often, along with her younger sister Trinity, 5, and her stepmother, Tamesha Dozier, who works as a hair stylist to help pay the family’s $1,400 monthly rent.

Azzura’e’s medical bills have reached well over a million dollars and the family is currently pursuing a lawsuit against the driver of the tractor-trailer, who was reportedly intoxicated and asleep at the wheel.

While at Blythedale, Azzura’e was able to keep up with her academic life with an iPad that was donated to her through the Children’s Aid Society.

Toward the final days at the rehabilitation center, Azzura’e asked to meet with all of her doctors. She wanted to hear for herself if she would ever walk again, she said. The doctors told her that if she did, it would not be anytime soon.

Azzura’e was not convinced.

“Since I woke up from my coma, I have more sensation with my legs and bladder, my legs are moving more and more, I’ve made so much progress,” Azzura’e said. “For you to tell me that I’m not going to walk, I say, ‘O.K., that’s your opinion,’ ” she said.

Azzura’e left Blythedale in a wheelchair last May, and began to prepare for her senior year of high school. In August, the Children’s Aid Society, one of the agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, awarded her $310 for clothes and school supplies.

At home, her stepmother changes her catheter tubes twice daily. In the evenings, Azzura’e practices slowly moving her legs.

Azzura’e has already taken her Preliminary SAT exams and applied to Marist College and some SUNY colleges in the hope of studying digital media.

“I hear a lot of people say, ‘I can’t do this,’ or ‘I don’t have time to do that.’ What if something as simple as getting up for school was a problem?” Azzura’e said.

“Me, I love school, yet I have to wait for someone to take me,” she said. “I want to tell my classmates that they can do anything that they want to do,” she said.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: After a Brush With Death, Focusing on the Next Step. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe